For a moment I thought I’d replied in the wrong context, but it looks like I just straight up replied to the wrong thing. My bad either way

Ooooh somehow I replied to your reply to the comment rather than to the comment (originally replying to me)

lmao, are you doing a bit? What the fuck could you possibly know, and why didn’t you check the easily checkable history of the sub’s modlist? The fact that you felt compelled to make this up should, frankly, embarrass you away from offering your comments on anything to do with either the sub or this instance at all

Oh you didn’t know? It’s much better than that. Were it not for /r/badphilosophy, /c/sneerclub simply would not be!

Of course, like the Basilisk herself, we should have had to invent it anyway, but it is with /r/badphilosophy that the soul of /c/sneerclub descends from the heavens to find its place in the grim corporeality down here

I’m saying they abuse adderall, an amphetamine, which class of drugs I can tell you from personal experience do turn you into a gibbering asshole if you abuse them, and it has bugger all to do with the appropriate use of ADHD medication

But please, if you want to call me out, have the good grace to use the second-person pronoun, this “can we please not” shit is the single most disingenuous phrase that’s entered the language since “I’m not a racist, but”

I suppose I get it, although I’m still a bit unsure how these examples count as “epistemic luck”

Well you make zero distinction between any of those things, most of which (BDS?!) aren’t even under discussion here, and your target is Ian Miles Cheong’s opinion-having about the US, particularly with respect to Oregon

What do you want me to do here?

Edit: let me rephrase that, what the hell do you want me to do here? Are you serious?

They aren’t their goalposts! They’re the goalposts already laid out in advance by the discourse and shaped in press releases since god knows when, that’s why it’s so easy to shift! There’s a whole avenue to be burrowed in Rationalism Studies, incidentally, about how Yud and his ilk inherited the same techniques from tobacco companies and the defense industry of the 1980s.

Look, if you want to understand where I’m coming from, I can give you - at a glance - the two sources I’ve already given: Alex Wellerstein Unrestricted Data and J.R. Ravetz “The Merger of Knowledge with Power”, specifically the two chapters cited (the Wellerstein chapter is “Unrestricted Data: New Challenges to the Cold War Secrecy Regime”. I would also urge you to check out Lisa Stampnitzky Disciplining Terror. The introduction to the Ravetz book is also a must-read, not just for this, but also for a general understanding of how scientific research at the industrial level serves political and sectoral interests of all kinds - this is not radical pamphleteering about “the politics of politicians” but real empirical work about the real conditions under which science is done.

Stampnitzky is extremely useful here for understanding how the word “terrorist” (or similar) functions in the sorts of papers you cite at the very top. “Terrorist” and “state actor” are political words, and the risks (supposedly) measured which are attached to the threats you describe are weighted by those words, not by the scientific words pertaining to technical capability. To say that “terrorists” might get hold of this or that technology is to say that a particular type of person (who may or may not exist) will get hold of that technical capacity and make use of it.

The point is, in fact, that technical capacity has almost nothing to do with the measurement of risk from terrorist acquisition of that technical capacity. The measurement of risk is locused pretty much exclusively around the type of person who poses a threat. That type of person is a construction of politics, not a scientifically neutral object term in which people with medical or physical science qualifications have any expertise whatsoever.

To put it extremely briefly, this means that when you come across papers by CBRN professionals assessing speculative risks, much of the work being done is being done at the behest of political projects which have their home in the defense industry, not in assessment of the mere technical capacities available to people at large. As we learn from Ravetz, speculative risk created such an enormous bubble during the Cold War that it is almost impossible to take those measured risks remotely seriously - and as we learn from Stampnitzky, the idea of a “terrorist” has been constructed in such a way as to fuel that bubble. This means that CBRN professionals, however unimpeachable their contributions to the amelioration of those occasional disasters which do actually happen, are thoroughly questionable as unbiased witnesses to the scale that risks at large present.

Because, as your own inconsistencies show, you are not having a focused discussion (for example: you angrily claim in your second reply that in your first you asked me to expand on an earlier point, even though this never actually happened) it is extremely difficult to get this point across without appearing to just be dismissive of technical capacity as a factor. But in fact technical capacity has been factored in to my discussion this entire time. The fact that you’re unaware of the political environment in which your (non-)fear finds its sources is not anybody’s fault, but it is your fault if you don’t even acknowledge that other people might have a clearer idea about how this stuff works.

“focused discussion”…right

100% agreed, what terrifies me is that our friend here seems to see the word “science” in here and immediately assume impeccable faith and perfect knowledge

As a matter of opinion, I gotta say our brief new friend the other day did give me flashbacks to the one time I interacted with Siskind, even if it’s just that Siskind’s particular style of incoherent personally afflicted grandeur only happens to correlate with how pill heads express theirs

Nobody more twisted up with resentment on planet earth than somebody just flying on an adderall binge